It’s Not Just Story Time and Bookmobiles
Buffy J. Hamilton
is a school librarian at Creekview High School in Canton, Ga. In
January she will become the learning strategist for the Cleveland Public
Library. She is on Twitter.
The media scholar Henry Jenkins has identified that such participatory sites of culture share five traits:
· Creating learning spaces through multiple participatory media;
· Providing opportunities for creating and sharing original works and ideas;
· Crafting an environment in which novices’ and experts’ roles are fluid as people learn together;
· Positing the library as a place where members feel a sense of belonging, value and connectedness; and
· Helping people believe their contributions matter by incorporating their ideas and feedback.
Modern libraries of all kinds – public, school, academic and special – are using this lens of participatory culture to help their communities rethink the idea of a “library.” By putting relationships with people first, libraries can recast and expand the possibilities of what we can do for communities by embodying what Guy Kawasaki calls enchantment: trustworthiness, likability, and exceptional services and products.
Libraries in various communities provide enchantment through traditional services, like story time, bookmobiles, classes and rich collections of books. However, libraries are also incorporating innovative new roles: librarians as instructional partners, libraries as “makerspaces,” libraries as centers of community publishing and digital learning labs.
While libraries face many challenges – budget cuts, an ever-shifting information landscape, stereotypes that sometimes hamper how people see libraries, and rapidly evolving technologies – our greatest resource is community participation. Relationships with the community build an organic library, that is of the people, by the people and for the people.